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August 26, 2014

what with tripoli apparently also falling to the caliphate as israel continues to thrash hamas i would think that we are proceeding into wide-scale super-regional war, which might constitute the defining historical event of this era.

i'd say it's a bad sign for hamas that they are executing "informers". that's what you do in your bunker in the last few mad moments of your movement.

August 04, 2014

one of the absurd features of the gaza war is that both sides spend most of their yaptime saying that the other side wouldn't accept ceasfire proposal x, or then that the other side violated the ceasfire. it goes on and on. it's completely impossible to evaluate if you're actually trying to figure out what is happening and not just trying to beef up your politico-ethnic prior commitments. it is so so obvious that neither side cares even a little about saying the truth. they're just trying to distract us.

August 02, 2014

if the israelis take this occasion to escalate significantly, or if further occasions arise, their actions might just edge into genocide. they have walled off a jam-packed ghetto on an ethnic basis, with a systematic policy to immiserate the people there. now those people are sitting ducks: as israel keeps insisting: right, we could just level the place. yes, indeed they could.

July 29, 2014

i want to say that when you're walled in, tunneling out is rational or inevitable. but for offensive operations, single-file tunnels of the kind they've been displaying from gaza into israel are about the worst idea imaginable: you come out gettin picked off one at a time and retreat is chaos.

July 22, 2014

the american foreign policy establishment (represented by madeleine albright this morning on cnn, e.g.) is still saying 'there must be a two-state solution', that's the only hope etc. if that's the only hope, there is no hope. the idea that israel ever was going to or ever will permit a palestinian state to emerge is false, whatever they may say. anyway, why isn't that just a formula for more and worse war? so if you can't come up with any new ideas, we're going to recapitulate this thing ad infinitum.

really, defining states ethnically/religiously cannot not lead to violence. it's just a wee bit as though we defined the united states as a white nation, for example. i think the only possible solution would be a fully multi-ethnic full democracy. but israel will never permit that either, because then it would have destroyed its own purpose and definition. so i would see this situation persisting for the next, say, century, with periodic outbreaks of slaughter.

July 18, 2014

the discourse around israel's invasion of gaza, for example by marco rubio, is remarkably childish. here's how it goes: they started it! (another pursuing this sophisticated line of argument is the krauthammer.) the slavishness of american politicians to the israeli propaganda line is pitiful. it's as if every single one of them is a ventriloquist's dummy, which come to think of it is quite possible. now maybe even rubio can understand this: ok, i am an assistant principal, strolling down the halls of my high school when is see the football team rodneykinging some sad little nerd. why? because that nerd poked the linebacker in the chest. he started it! so as assistant prinipal, it is your job to help kick in the nerd's ribs, and also to defend the football team against any criticism for their action.

it cannot be irrelevant to a moral assessment of this situation that you've got these people walled into a...camp, that they have no real power or resources while you have annihilating military force, or that you are killing hundreds of them while they are killing none of you.

July 02, 2014

it should be relentlessly emphasized that the notion of collective identity has various dark sides. the idea that if 'they' kill 'our' kids, 'we''ll kill 'theirs' back treats groups rather than individuals as moral agents. really, from collective identity would follow collective responsibilty: if the gov of the usa were our collective identity you'd be responsible for the drone program or for surveiling angela merkel. well, obviously shit is a lot more complicated than that even if we are all complicit through taxation. we are less complicit in that the taxation is compelled. then again, that's why it's laughable that it really is our collective idenitity.

August 30, 2013

once more on syria. of course i called for a cruise missile through assad's window at the outset. and i'd still support such a step, which would be both 'punitive' and 'strategic.' but i also share my fellow war-mongers(krauthammer, e.g.)'s irritation that you'd proceed by publicly promising for day after day to do x, y, and z, and everyone in the regime has surely spent the time running for cover, even as obama's promising not to target or remove him. i would have tried to assassinate him the next day.

just to try to establish the slightest credibility on this: i was squawking about how ridiculous the pseudo-intelligence was on iraq from the go, in print. that colin powell performance at the un was pitiful; i will never take him seriously again. i do not believe they got the intelligence wrong and believed it; i think they manufactured intelligence and sold it like a used car. now, as far as such things go, what kerry (who i just tried to rip to shreds in 2004; the worst presidential candidate i ever saw; he never even managed to take a position on iraq) presented today was comparatively convincing. however, if you were waiting for the u.s. intelligence to weigh in in order to make up your mind, you're kind of screwed both ways around, because (a) you should never believe what intelligence people say publicly on the sheer grounds that they said it (nothing is better-established ever in the whole wide world), and (b) the evidence was already as convincing as it could be, in the nature of something like this; you should already have known.

i just don't think there is any real room for doubt about what happened. it's frigging obvious. he has the gas and the rockets to deliver it. he did his massacre in a center of resistance to his regime. the on-the-ground vids and accounts from aid workers and ordinary people have more credibility than any cia memo. there just is no plausible alternative explanation unless you absolutely insist that you will only believe what would support your idea of what ought to be done even as the reality is staring you in the face.

i am aware of the tension of this with anti-statism. but also people like me are - or surely ought to be - incredibly repulsed by murderous tyrants. i have an autonomic response of violent hostility; they, and not whoever irritated keith olbermann today by disagreeing with him, are the worst people in the world, and definitely the worst boyfriends. i don't think you get any very clear guidance on this from the sheer fact of being an anarchist.

August 29, 2013

the question has arisen, here as elsewhere. i guess the first thing to say is that every killing technique kills people and also wounds and injures people; that's what all these things are for. so i'd sort of go piecemeal, and it would be silly to say that chemical weapons are the worst sort of weapons in every respect. but, chemical weapons are, first, entirely indiscrimate: they just kill or wound everyone in a given area, which is why they are grotesque when applied to, say, neighborhoods or inhabited regions. and they can't even be confined to the area you want to target even if you hit it, because they waft at the whim of the winds. and they are cheap and easy to make, so it is especially difficult to stop their proliferation. it's a task for the mullahs or the beloved leader to make a nuke and deliver it, or even a biological agent; i could probably whip up poisonous gas in my basement. of course the sorts of injuries and deaths inflicted by sarin are excruciating and horrific; you die slowly in one of the most painful ways possible. you can imagine a situation in which whole cities or regions could be gassed in a horrifying genocide; you turn a whole city into an instant auschwitz; saddam (with cia assistance) came close to this, but it could even be worse, and assad has the stuff to do it.

but if you're considering whether it would better to have your neighborhood gassed or napalmed, for example, you would face a difficult decision. if assad were napalming neighborhoods, i hope people would have the same reaction, and for god's sake i hope they'd be outraged and want to do something about it. the firebombing of dresden or tokyo, the nuking of nagasaki: right, these weren't any more wonderful or less indiscriminate than it would have been to use gas. now, cruise missiles actually are somewhat better in my opinion (look, we are moraly distinguishing ways of killing people, which always is going to look rather grotesque), for example, as is anything that on a good day can be reasonably precisely targeted so that you could try to limit their use to actual military targets. obviously, even in a best case you are liable to kill and injure innocent people. but still, there is a moral distinction between a weapon you can (if all goes well) drop right into the military command center, and a weapon whose nature forces you, if you use it at all, to take out the command center by annihilating everyone in its whole region.

August 25, 2013

i hope those who savaged me for suggesting early intervention in syria including the assassination of the monster bashar al-assad are watching children being gassed to death. they are going to do something now anyway, i believe: at least 100,000 deaths and innumerable tortures and millions of refugees later.

August 15, 2013

one thing the ongoing disaster in egypt shows: the military never stopped running the government. (also, they run the economy in a nice version of squishy totalitarianism). well, i figure the nsa runs the government here. if they don't, it's a sheer act of charity, because for one thing they could destroy anyone at any time, don't care if you're a ceo, senator, president, and so on. indeed, they don't have to come up with substantive threats: a cocked eyebrow or barely-detectable sideways smile would make any of these people change course on a dime. next time you hear someone defending the nsa programs as essential to our national security, don't figure you should generate reasons on the other side - which are achingly obvious anyway. just ask yourself what the nsa has on him. start with mike rogers, say. this is an ad hominem i can get behind: if you are on the other side of the argument on this one, i figure it's very likely that you're not at all sincere - which is good, because if you were, you'd be profoundly evil. no, the only reasonable explanation is that keith anderson's minions are operating you like a marionette. maybe you think i'm kidding. imagine that j. edgar hoover had achieved omniscience.

January 15, 2013

so, everyone got all huffy a year or two ago when i was recommending a cruise missile through bashar al-assad's window. now, 60,000 dead and millions displaced later, i wonder whether you'd still reject that on the grounds that assad is, after all, an opponent of the united states, or on the grounds that his dad mouthed his enthusiasm for world proletarian revolution soviet-style while pursuing the liberation of thousands of souls onto the ethereal plain, or on whatever other grounds you might have been advancing at the time.

November 29, 2012

nothing is more disingenuous and fallacious than the statement of susan rice at the un, concerning this rudimentary proto-recognition of the palestinian territories, that the us opposes it because the two-state solution 'can only emerge from direct negotiations with the israeli government.' um, ok, so why is this incompatible with that? it's completely irrelevant. if we support palestinian statehood, we should be happy to endorse this little symbol of its possibility. this only constitutes a 'barrier to negotions' (the israeli formulation) in the sense that it could conceivably give the palestinians some little bit of leverage. of course, the israelis will only negotiate on a completely asssymmetrical basis. even then there's no chance they will agree to statehood.

the truth is that we oppose palestinian statehood until the israelis endorse it, which is, i predict, never. the israeli negotiating position is ridiculous; they certainly do not have any interest in palestinian statehood, but they're constantly pretending to endorse the two-state solution. you can't talk to people when they're just yapyaping like this. they'll say anything. their actual strategy is to represent their policy as being the opposite of what their policy is in fact. let's say they have mixed succes in concealing their actual policies, but there's no sense talking to them because what they say is always the opposite of what they do. how it could possibly be in our interest to echo this line of jive is a question i leave to the professionals. i said the same last year when the thing came up before.

November 21, 2012

the best use of cnn is something like this gaza situation; they're reporting from gaza city, jerusalem, cairo, etc; you watch bombs exploding live behind the anchors. they have crazy-brave war correspondents who have done every conflict and who speak fluent arabic: ben wedeman and arwa damon, for example; these are people who did day-by-day through iraq, watched libya explode, have infiltrated into syria. really people like that are still my heroes. wedeman did an amazing piece about a funeral for a family killed in gaza yesterday. i have to say wolf blitzer is the best anchor in a case like this, despite whatever ethnic/professional background he may have: scrupulously fair, very sharp and pointed interviewing people from either side. anderson cooper likewise. sneer at their ratings slump if you want; they are indispensable.

November 08, 2012

so the syrian opposition generates a new leadership. headline here? no women. as your village is shelled and your mom explodes, i'd be appointing a commission on pay equity. as far as i'm concerned, they can sit there and die until they get to 17% lesbians. how many latinos in the leadership of the syrian revolution? surely these people can be made to understand the importance of tokenism to the war effort.

by the way, i would definitely support legislation to remove your children from your custody if you permit them to watch ss. here i make a serious assertion: sesame street is the worst children's show ever, and quite a plausible candidate for the very worst television show of any sort. sesame street completely misconstrues the nature of childhood, not to speak of the nature of television. not every minute has to be another minute of fake play to teach; and we can do more for our kids than try to manufacture them as democrats. childhood is intrinsically, not just instrumentally, valuable, and if the point is that you'll never know how i or the corporation for public broadcasting actually formed your consciousness because you'll be under the delusion that you're having fun and acting autonomously; oh, think again and feel more fully your love of small persons. it's like you're forcing these poor little saps to listen to sting. or it's like the new punch and judy show, brought to you by erich honecker. i'm not sure you really want to entirely break down the distincton between entertainment and manipulation, but at least it doesn't work very well: the thing is as entertaining as a migraine. it's helping you model extreme insincerity, though, which will be extremely important to your children's future success. fortunately the ideas and values and characters are so blank that even though your three-your-old might be chanting along to the numbers again, it's going to be nothing compared to his discovery of something actual, like sponge bob say. really key to parenting: ask yourself, how can i manipulate my children to do and believe and say what someone told me they're supposed to, while all the time cleverly pretending to play with them? this is key to preparing your great love/little sucker for the college admissions process. supposedly sesame street was a substitute for pre-school for ghetto kids, growing up in housing projects built on the same aesthetic model. if you think ghetto kids got anything out of that or that it had a big inner-city audience, you are mistaken. it had a multi-cultural cast but the most painful whitebread aesthetic. its actual function was pre-kaplan sat prep course for suburbanites.

that's a rant, in case you're wondering, ma! meanwhile, where is bashar al-assad with his helicopter gunships when you need him? for episode 18 billion or whatever they're up to this week i want the whole cast down there in his state-of-the-art torture/education facility, forced to count from 11 to 20 and not recycle. the opposition to assad on sesame street will be evanescent. but it will be diverse.

June 08, 2012

here is an interesting piece from today's all things considered, about a bookseller in tunis who dealt with state censorship for years. now she's trying to decide whether to stock the memoir of leila ben ali, the hated and deeply corrupt wife of the former dictator. the bookstore person says she wants to read it herself, and i would imagine many tunisians would be curious. look there are many reasons to read a book, right? including to find out more about what and how and why to hate. she has decided not to stock it, which i can understand. but here's what i would suggest. what would convince me not to sell it would be that leila is presumably getting royalties. get ahold of a copy and then go for maximum piracy. xerox it and give it away. xerox it and deface it and give it away. post it on multiple websites in multiple formats. try to make it irrational for anyone to buy the thing. post it with your own introduction. post it with commentary. throw a party where you smoke it, etc.

June 07, 2012

the conventional formulation now is that syria is on the brink of a civil war. i think that if i were syrian, i would demand civil war. it beats sitting there watching the government's militias set your children on fire. you just have got to shoot back, basically no matter what the cost.

February 26, 2012

and speaking of my hawkish streak: i'm surprised by the naivete of the left on iran. don't be blinded by the iraq debacle; it's not the same thing. i thought the evidence the bush admin produced on wmd in iraq was pitiful, and i said so over and over again. on the other hand, don't sit there and tell me that iran isn't working on nuclear weapons. it's obvious. they're saying that even as they're denying it. and have you actually listened to ahmadinejad? it's both wacky and chilling. what to do about it is a different question, but pretending it isn't happening and isn't a big old problem is something else. i know y'all dearly love a theocracy as long as santorum isn't running it, but please.

February 25, 2012

sorry for no blogging. life has been overfull lately: moving, among other things, while, um, totaling my car etc. however, my life is less overfull than that of the citizens of homs, and i'd take the approach not of 'arming the rebels,' but of bombing the regime's emplacements outside the city, exploding their incoming tanks, etc. yes it's true then you're in a libya situation and there's no real reason you shouldn't be trying to locate the regime's leaders with the purpose of resolving them into their constituent particles.

February 04, 2012

the un in its great courage may be nearing a resolution calling on assad to resign. if i were drafting, the 'international community' would be resolving to sandusky assad with a stick of dynamite, detonate him, then meticulously reassemble him and blow him up again.

December 17, 2011

simon brings my attention to cockburn on hitchens. i say this piece is based on three basic insights: (1) people who disagree with me are evil. (2) people who are more successful than me are evil. (3) people who are better than me at what i do are evil.

let me say something about the neo-con hitch (and also his friend martin amis), with their embrace of the concept of 'islamo-fascism,' and their suggestions that islam itself needed to be suppressed because of the terrorists who appeal to it. the anti-communist right-wingers of the fifties and sixties had cracked moments, and a really psychotic overreaction suggesting things such as that dwight eisenhower was an agent of the international communist conspiracy. they engaged in an active process of putting everyone under surveillance for intellectual purity, a kind of parody of what they were supposedly fighting against. but however, communism was a frigging nightmare, and if you weren't an anti-communist in 1961, and if you are not an anti-communist now, you were/are extremely wrong, an advocate of totalitarianism and evil. that joseph mccarthy was terribly wrong and extremely dangerous to liberty does not entail that josef stalin was ok. and in this case, if you have anything nice to say about al qaeda-type terrorism (like one of my colleagues at mica, who was in the habit calling osama a 'freedom fighter'), if you do anything to try to take the sting out of the sheer irrational evil, you are really really wrong. and if you think it can be detached entirely from islam, i think you're misguided, as i think the attempt to completely detach stalinism or the khmer rouge from marxist communism is a pitiful rationalization. and obviously hitchens' anti-religious fervor both fed and was fed by his 'islamophobia.' so: i think this led him into numerous extremely wrong conclusions. it led him to endorse something like a world war for the suppression of islam as a whole. but, there was a truth at the heart.

also, opinion journalism is not itself violence or repression. there's no point in vaguely holding hitchens responsible for invading iraq. what he did was write; that doesn't force anyone to do anything. this is one reason why we should defend freedom of expression at its widest scope. the right response to hitchens is to refute the arguments; if he kicked your ass you had no one to blame but yourself, and you should have tried again. i'll give cockburn this: he did try to do that. he is no match for hitchens in argument or polemic or wit, but that just means he needs more craft.

also if he was wrong on this, it of course does not follow that he was wrong in his literary judgments, or his picture of the history of ideas, or whatever it may be. he was often right about such things, and spoke from a depth of knowledge and reflection that made the arguments compelling even if not right.

December 10, 2011

if i was running israel or if i was in the republican jewish coalition i would actually worry about the extreme enthusiasm for your nation and people of the likes of bachmann and perry, and of all the republican candidates (except paul) insofar as they abase themselves before israel as a way to court evangelical votes. these people intend to convert you, in order to hasten the rapture. for that matter, is that the kind of idea we want as the basis of our middle east policy? obviously it has no rational aspect; it doesn't pursue american interests; it doesn't try to understand anything that's happening on the ground at all; it slaps an a priori and completely rationally arbitrary interpretation on the realities; it is a delusional or psychotic approach to an actually dangerous zone of conflict and to actual real persons. also it is a formula for religious war.

meanwhile newt's notion that the palestinian people are an invention is extraordinarily offensive, and ought to to give everyone doubts about a newt presidency. in some sense every people is invented. 'the american people' is an invention, though it's newt's favorite trope. that doesn't mean it isn't real. you need to listen to how people identify themselves and take that perfectly seriously. but this is a little prelude to 'cultural genocide'; whatever you may call yourselves, you don't count, and the destruction of your culture would not be the destruction of anything.